MY CITY; When the Grass Was Greener

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: July 6, 2007

FIRST of all there's the sound, or near lack of it, when the ball slides across grass. It's not like the cracking ''thok'' of a ball hitting a hard court or even clay, which syncopates with the noises of balls smashing off racquets. This sound is gentler, cushioned, endearing. And in lieu of clomping feet, there's a shuffling, like rustling silk, of carpeted steps. You can imagine in the old days when pros used wood rackets, which made a delicate ''plonk,'' why tennis on grass -- watching or playing it -- seemed downright pastoral.

And then there's the smell, the scent of a newly mown lawn. Lovely. The court, close shaven, has a few slight undulations -- the unavoidable consequence of wrestling nature into a Cartesian plane -- but surprisingly there are fewer bad bounces than on an unswept clay court. With the soft ground under your feet and the smell and the sound, you can wonder why grass isn't the most popular surface in tennis, until the sliced ball skids away from you or drops dead at net, and you're left flatfooted on the baseline with a stupid grin on your face.

Three of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments used to take place on grass. There was Wimbledon, of course, and the Australian Open in Melbourne, before it switched to hard courts. And until 30 or so years ago the United States Open at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills.

Now there's only Wimbledon, which, if the weather cooperates (it mostly hasn't so far), reaches its climax this weekend. A retractable roof is being added to an expanded Center Court there, and players already have recourse to instant replay. The grass at Wimbledon has been cut to make the courts act more like hard courts or clay. They're slower than they used to be, and the balls make bigger bounces. Here in America grass courts have become as scarce as polo fields and almost exclusively private.

The other day, with Wimbledon in mind, I phoned West Side, a private club but welcoming to outsiders, and reached Bob Ingersole, the dry-humored, bluff, Australian-born director of tennis. He oversees 38 immaculate courts: a mix of grass, hard and clay. I asked about finagling an hour or so on one of the grass courts.

So it was that I hopped the E train and found myself beside a patient, friendly young pro named Ben Gologor, dressed in tennis whites (still a club requirement). Ben brought two fresh cans of balls, one yellow, one white. Who even knew there still were white balls? They looked like cream puffs.

We started by rallying at the net. Watch out, Ben reminded me. Balls die on grass. No big backswings. No sitting back on your heels. No problem, I said. I'm ready.

I missed a forehand that fainted at my ankles. I smiled. Then I missed another.

I looked around to see if anyone was watching. Back in the 1970s, visiting these same courts as a fan during the Open meant joining a tony, white-clad scrum jostling for sightlines behind the fences and along narrow passages between courts. It meant Jack Kramer wood rackets and the new Wilson T2000 metal ones, which seemed positively space age then, and it also meant Mr. Peanut hawking salted snacks beneath the concrete stadium.

The club was small and familial, timber and stucco. Players mingled easily with fans -- this was long before top pros moved behind a phalanx of bodyguards -- and they signed autographs while sauntering to and from the cramped changing rooms in the clubhouse, with its striped awnings and its broad, stony veranda, overlooking the lawns. The clubhouse, mock Tudor, like much of the neighborhood of Forest Hills Gardens, resembled a country inn.

Some of the greatest matches took place in the stadium, not far from where I was hitting, after a fashion, with Ben. During the men's semifinals in 1975, by which time the Open had briefly switched from grass to clay, Guillermo Vilas, the long-haired, brooding Argentine poet, was far ahead and serving match point against Manuel Orantes, and the stadium had nearly emptied. Then, miraculously, Orantes rallied to win. Two years later Vilas grabbed the title. That turned out to be the last time the Open was played at Forest Hills.

It moved to Flushing Meadows, a few miles away, more suited to television and enormous crowds, became once and for all a hard-court event, and big matches came to be played in the cavernous Arthur Ashe Stadium, with its pumped-in music and glassed-in luxury boxes. The more intimate grass-court era in America gradually faded from public consciousness.

With Ben's indulgence I accustomed myself to the bounces on the lawn. My old continental grip, the equivalent of a CB radio in an era of e-mail, finally came in handy. Flat shots and heavy slice work on grass. More than once I stared dumbfounded when Ben ended a practice baseline rally with a short shot or a slice to a corner and I was too lethargic to react.

I did manage to ace him once, slicing my serve, or maybe he had just stopped paying attention for a second. In any case as the hour wore on, I was the one panting and gulping Powerade, and I appreciated the enormous backcourt, which let me take unseemly breathers while I slowly walked to the fence to pick up the balls I had missed.